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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937921">when the world fell</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas'>Tyellas</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Mad Max Series (Movies), Terminator (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Nudity, Post-Apocalypse, Resolution, Sexism, Talking, cannibalism reference, nuclear horror</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 23:08:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,311</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937921</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Five ways the apocalypses of Terminator and Mad Max might have crossed over...</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Terminator: Dark Fate Prompt Meme</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>when the world fell</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A fill for this prompt from the T:DF Prompt Meme: 'Terminator: Dark Fate and Mad Max: Fury Road. What it says on the tin. Not really sure what this would look like but I love me an apocalypse with strong women.' </p><p>It looks like dreams and nightmares... falling satellites... iconic metal skulls... encounters where strangeness blends into the madness of a post-apocalypse... and a few women's determination to make their own fate.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>By now, Sarah Connor has dreamed of the future for decades.</p><p>It’s almost always the same dream. There’s a colorful playground. Sarah steps up to its chain link fence, horrified, knowing. Wondering who to warn first. When she gives in, tries to warn them all, rattling the fence, they can’t hear her. Her voice, her scream, is silent.</p><p>Until the nuclear explosion blooms, and they all scream together.</p><p>Destruction rolls after, like frames of a film on fast-forward while she curses it out, hammers the fence, orders it to stop, stop, stop –</p><p>And it does, suddenly. The smoke and ruin of the future mists into darkness lit with red flickers, a post-apocalyptic take on Plato’s primal cave. Leaving her face to face, this once, with a man.</p><p>Sarah snaps, “Who the fuck are you?” Because he’s not her future-past lover, the only person to break this dream’s trajectory before. Kyle is always perfect in Sarah’s dreams, on his edge between rugged and beautiful. This guy is a wreck. A hairball wrapped in cracked leather, close enough for her to see his eyes are blue.</p><p>The man opens his mouth, but it’s in shock, not to answer her.   </p><p>Sarah lifts her hands in surrender. “I tried to warn them. Didn’t work. It never, ever worked. Judgement Day came. Terminated billions of them. First the nukes, and then - ” She stops. That must be why this guy’s a wreck. Judgement Day came and got him. He’s eating roaches in the future’s ruins, on the run from Terminators.</p><p>She breathes. “My son. John Connor. Resistance leader. Do you know my son?”</p><p>The word <em> son </em> blasts him like the nukes blasted her. He shakes his head. His blunt, hoarse voice cracks. “I. I couldn’t save my own. When the world fell.”</p><p>Sarah swallows, at that. And -</p><p>Wakes up.</p><p>Wakes up alone, in her own metallic hangover sweat, heart screaming. Is it Judgement Day? The day when the world, Sarah knew, was going to go to shit. When artificial intelligence rose up to terminate its human creators, and humans, with fear and confusion and nukes, would try to beat the machines to it. Has this dream come to warn her through the twists of time when John, when Kyle, couldn’t?</p><p>Sarah reaches beside her bed.</p><p>She can turn a light on. Her hand, on the switch, is knotted with age. It’s not Judgement Day.</p><p>Sarah flicks it back off. Lets darkness and truth fill her.</p><p>John is dead. Sarah knows that when she’s awake. It’s Dani Ramos she should have asked about. Sarah hears the girl sigh, down the hallway, in her own dream. Dani is the one who’ll lead the Resistance, save the world. Fuck if Sarah knows how Dani will do it. She’s too tired to change fate again beyond keeping the girl alive.</p><p>She falls back against her clammy sheets. No, it’s not Judgement Day. Yet. But it will be.</p><hr/><p>As the world fell, each of them, in their own way was broken. Max Rockatansky didn’t count barely speaking as being broken. That made sense when he was trying to survive in a post-nuclear wasteland. Same with his obsession with his Interceptor. What broke Max was what he couldn’t control: visions of the past.</p><p>The visions came to him as he slept and as he fought. People from all the years of his apocalyptic wanderings, long dead, looming out of darkness lit with red flickers. Their faces weeping, their voices accusing, <em> you let us die </em>, until this vision, tonight. When one face pauses. Calls the end of the world Judgement Day. And she’s the worst of all, for she speaks of a dead son. Like his own.</p><p>Witnessing this vision, Max is frozen, more powerless than usual, because who <em> is </em> she? He feels like he should know her, but he doesn’t. One moment she’s young, a dewy blonde, with fluffy hair that hurts him with its softness, so like his lost wife Jessie. The next moment, time has harrowed her. And she doesn’t know him – she doesn’t begin like the other ghosts did, crying Max’s name. But something about her draws him to try and speak. To explain.</p><p>Until –</p><p>Max jolts awake. Who he wasn’t, who he was, dies on his lips.</p><p>Max is awake in the Interceptor. He’d parked up under a cliff, beneath a dramatic layered fold of stone. The great cliff held the day’s warmth. Max had parked there to ward off the Wasteland’s deadly night chill. It hadn’t worked, tonight: it is piercingly cold. Max glimpses frost on his windshield.</p><p>Max decides against licking up the frost. He is just about to exhale back into sleep when he <em> hears</em>.</p><p>Outside, someone is walking heedlessly. A heavy tread crunches the sand and cliff-scree.</p><p>Max might have failed to save the young-old woman or her son. But she’d saved him, waking him to hear this.</p><p>In the car, Max plays dead. He lets one hand drape over the wheel, as if in sleep. Hooks a sawn-off shotgun with his other hand. Lest the tread crunch closer.</p><p>When light pierces his eyelids, Max cracks an eye open to find himself scrutinized. The shadow of a big man hovers outside the car, peering in. He isn’t shining a light on Max: one of his eyes seems to have a disconcerting red glow. The tech people rig up in this Wasteland is amazing, but…that?</p><p>A fear he’s never known crawls through him, and Max has felt a lot of fear in this Wasteland.</p><p>The red light shutters. The big man steps up to hammer the car’s roof. <em> Bang. Bang. Bang. </em> Max rises upright smoothly, ready to drive and shoot at the same time.</p><p>A deep, clipped voice says “I need your clothes, your boots, and your vehicle.”</p><p>Max relaxes. This is a normal shakedown. “Uh-uh.”</p><p>There is a pause. “Is that affirmative?”</p><p>Max realizes that the big guy is actually naked. He still says, “No.”</p><p>And, like that denial unleashes a curse, an unearthly howl rises around them, sawed through with the roar of engines.</p><p>Max jolts. “Buzzards!” This man’s just tried to steal from him, might yet try to kill him, but Buzzards – what those mad cannibals do – “Get in!”</p><p>The man does the opposite. He turns. “Other vehicular options,” he muses aloud. His uncanny eye lights up again. </p><p>From the shadows, the Buzzards shriek in reply, excited by all the flesh on offer. Engines rev harder. Max can’t waste a moment. He hits the gas. Tears out of there. Leaves the red-eyed stranger, and the Buzzards, to shred each other. He knows the price of his life will be seeing that man again in his dreams.</p><hr/><p>Most of the time, now that the world had fallen, the man is whittled down to his title: the Bullet Farmer. But at times, inside his head, he is still a soldier, a survivor, a man. Kalashnikov.</p><p>As a soldier, he fought to keep his commander and allies alive when the world fell. As a survivor, he took on the burden of managing munitions and mining to keep their troops going. Even when those troops morphed into War Boys and Polecats and his own faithful boys at the Bullet Farm. When his commander’s creed became a fertility cult, and his own beliefs whittled down into war and justice, and a slave they’d picked up at the side of the road wormed their way to be in charge of where Kalashnikov stands today.</p><p>He is in a precarious glass eagle’s nest overlooking their fallen world’s last working oil refinery, Gastown. He gazes down at its tangle of pipeworks, flames, and smoke, seeping pollution for kilometres around, until the next climate-crash storm sweeps it away.</p><p>Gastown’s undisputed dictator speaks behind him. “Splendid, is it not? The heart and brains of the Wasteland. Compared to Joe’s mucky Citadel. Which feeds us, I grant. That makes it the stomach, and a few other organs…” The speaker chuckles ripely. Kalashnikov knows this man’s name, too. But the People Eater gleefully cast it aside thousands of days ago to immerse himself in their brave new world of ruthless survival, cage fights, cannibalism, and all.</p><p>He replies tersely. “Bullet Farm, then?”</p><p>The People Eater purrs, “Our bones. Thanks to your steel and munitions.”</p><p>Someone hammered on the ceiling above them, pulled open a trap door. A goggled head peers down. “Message on the shortwave, sir. You’ll want to hear this.”</p><p>“Oh, will I? This will be rich. Come on up. This will be amusing.”</p><p>Kalashnikov bounds up the ladder that’s sent down in ten seconds, intrigued. It takes the People Eater longer to ascend, assisted fore and aft. He is not a well man, the People Eater. Some unnameable disease has finished claiming his nose and beginning work on a limping foot. But the metal nose he wears now shines as bright and sharp as the man’s eyes and undiminished, cruel intelligence.</p><p>Together, the tall man and the big one crowd the space. A wiry radio operator shrinks to make way. Their last word is, “They’re here, Commander. Putting them on. Over.”</p><p>The People Eater sits, spreads, adjusts his greasy parody of a business suit, before finally deigning to pick up the microphone. When he speaks, his voice is plummy with the past. “Who are you and what is this about?”</p><p>There’s a hopeful inhale at the other end. “I am Commander Danielle Ramos of the Human Resistance in North America – “</p><p>The People Eater cuts her off. “Wait, wait. Why ‘human’? Don’t tell me you’ve got mutants running around up there.”</p><p>“No. We have been engaged in a twenty-year war with artificial intelligence. Legion and its Machines. Its Terminators.”</p><p>“Oh, is that what they’re blaming the collapse of human civilisation on? Nice for you, darling.”</p><p>“It is the truth!” She pauses. “For us.”</p><p>Kalashnikov nods. Someone is thinking on their feet. Is smart enough to pause at the People Eater’s tone. The People Eater has to say, “Keep talking, darling, you’ve got a lovely voice,” for her go on. Though Ramos sounds icy when she does, doing her best to smooth out her lilting accent.</p><p>“The machines have hunted us. They want to dominate this world – make it a world only for them. But we are close to winning our war. We have a major breakthrough that will improve this world from everyone – and keep you safe, where you are. We ask you to become our allies and to give us help in our final struggle.”</p><p>Kalashnikov is intrigued, irritated. To think he’s missed tactical information – a chance to fight against an intelligent, an<em> ultimate </em> enemy instead of in moronic skirmishes – to be on a winning side  –  He grits his teeth so hard one cracks. Another bullet will replace it soon.</p><p>The People Eater is less inspired. He snorts. “Clearly you don’t know who you’re talking to. This is Gastown. The Triumverate. We do not ‘give help’. You might buy my Gastown’s help – if you have resources. But for a happy ending to your noble fight,” his voice drips sarcasm, “You’ve come to the wrong place.”</p><p>Ramos says, “You do not understand! The entire world is at risk!”</p><p>The People Eater huffs. “If you poked your nose outside your bunker occasionally you’d understand what survival and fighting truly meant. I suppose you’ve still got MREs? Batteries? Maybelline?”</p><p>Ramos gasps, then spits, “Fuck you, <em> pendejo </em>!”</p><p>The People Eater leans into the microphone. “Are you insulting me, darling? Because that’s <em> terribly </em> interesting – “</p><p>The connection cuts out, leaving only static.</p><p>There is a fuming silence.</p><p>He shifts a tooth fragment inside his mouth and asks, “Do we tell Joe?”</p><p>The People Eater replies immediately. “No. She’s mad. She and whoever she ‘commands’ in her cult. Machines seeking world domination! I suppose that story makes how the oil and water wars crashed us all tolerable to them. Heaven forbid anything’s their own fault. <em> We </em> are the ones saving the world. We’ve got nothing to gain. Everything to lose.” The People Eater jerks his jacket lapels to cover his nipple piercings. “Our Triumverate works – barely. Say nothing to no-one. We have enough problems.”</p><p>He’s not wrong, Kalashnikov has to admit.</p><p>And, the Bullet Farmer once more, he sets it aside.</p><p>But he remembers it two months later, at the Bullet Farm. When, one night, instead of Wasteland storms, aurora australis paint the sky. The miners and engineers on the night shift pause to look up, murmuring, gasping when the sheets of aurora-light are streaked by falling stars. Or, he thought, satellites giving up the ghost in an electronic disruption. How did you win a war against electronics, machines? That would be a way…</p><p>He turns away from the glorious sight.  Maybe it means the iron in his soldier’s blood was right about Commander Ramos and her war against machines. If it is, he has some engineers to talk to. Fast.</p><hr/><p>At the Citadel, in the Vault, it is evening.</p><p>The scene, meant to be a paradise, protected from the Wasteland outside, is a kind of hell. Five too-young concubines, and their old teacher, are kept there. Angharad, Capable, Toast, the Dag, Cheedo, and Miss Giddy – the History Woman. The soft, worn carpets and books, the piano and chandelier, the pool of fresh water might as well be Wretched ashes. For the sealed Vault door holds them prisoner to the whims of a cruel and powerful warlord.</p><p>Prisoners’ ennui weighs on them tonight. The young women are unnaturally silent. Until the newest and youngest, Cheedo, asks, “Miss Giddy…how did it happen? The end of the world.”</p><p>The other girls tense. The cleverest one, Toast, hisses, shakes her head. For they are guarded tonight. Imperator Furiosa is trapped in here with them, eyes glaring, muscles twitching, the most bored of them all. She has been there a week, surly, near-silent. Watching.</p><p>Miss Giddy weighs the moment. Decides that if she shares everything, the Imperator will be grasping at smoke. Because it’s a tale with no single truth. She runs a tattooed hand down a tattooed arm, feeling history flicker through her mind. “Do you know, nobody can say for sure. Think of it as happening forty-five years ago last Wednesday…”</p><p>Furiosa is watching, immobile. Miss Giddy goes on, her voice light as a sad feather. “Some say it was oil wars, people fighting over guzzoline. But we were about to stop using the dirty stuff. Others say it was the water wars. And it is true that fighting for water ripped the world apart. But on the day the world fell, it seemed to come out of nowhere. Sirens, bombs, cities destroyed.”</p><p>“It was so cruel, so illogical, we could barely believe people had done it. The rumors went on for years  – I mean, thousands of days. That it was a conspiracy turned sour. A cult that had taken over. We even heard a few times that it was an artificial intelligence gone rogue.”</p><p>“A what?” Cheedo asks.</p><p>“Yes, what?” They all jolt at that. Because that question comes from dour Furiosa.</p><p>Miss Giddy forces herself to look to the shadow where Furiosa stands, hands on her hips, one hand flesh, the other hand metal. “Once we all had Before-time devices called computers. Machines that shared information. Small ones in our hands, huge ones in cities, ones in the sky called satellites, sending out shows. Rumor had it that some computers had begun to think as well as learn. And, like all children, they wanted to rebel against their parents. Have a world of their own.”</p><p>Miss Giddy is so tense now she doesn’t have a single heartbeat, just a shrill of blood in her ears. This tension will kill her if she doesn’t test it hard. “It was even said that the artificial intelligence tried to infiltrate humanity. Building machines cloaked in flesh, sending them among us, to be exposed by their inevitable inhuman ways. Or their metal bones.”</p><p>She gives her old head a birdlike tilt. “Did <em> you </em> ever hear about that, Imperator?”</p><p>Silence pools heavy as oil as Furiosa shifts her metal arm, flexes it. “No.”</p><p>“It doesn’t matter whether it was true or not. Because, some thousand, perhaps two thousand days back, the last satellites fell. Like all that intelligence gave up, ran down.”</p><p>At that, the woman who is part machine settles back. Gives a satisfied nod. Like Furiosa enjoys hearing about a mysterious power failing.</p><p>“Time for some beauty sleep, girls,” Miss Giddy says. The young women all pick up on what she means, keen as the satellites once were.</p><hr/><p>Since the Fury Road, the tatters of Max’s life have been raveling together again. Three of them are weaving strangely, here and now. The blood bond of the Fury Road. The time he nearly got shredded by a strange man and a ring of Buzzards. And the half-known vision that had saved him that night and haunted him since.</p><p>Max had figured the woman from that dream out at last. From the few tales Furiosa had told of guarding the Immortan’s Vault, she must have been the History Woman. Max had surely been meant to rescue her at some point. He hadn’t, one of his many failures. Instead, the History Woman had stayed enslaved to keep the Immortan’s Wives sane. When the Wives escaped, spirited away by Furiosa, and the History Woman refused to traitor them, History had paid the price. She was killed on the Fury Road, blood-circled in the sand before a howling host of War Boys.</p><p>So when Furiosa goes back to the Fury Road, hunting the History Woman’s bones, Max goes, too.</p><p>Before that, Max had found his way back to the Interceptor. He always does. He’s driving it now when Furiosa says, “That cliff. Pull over there.”</p><p>In the searing noonday, Max goes cold. He recognizes that cliff, its great folds of stone. One night, he tried camping there, met a stranger, fled Buzzards. Left the strange man to die. Odd how that man, out of all of them, hadn’t appeared in the gallery of his nightmares.</p><p>Hands sweating, Max obeys Furiosa. She gets out and paces the dunes lapping the cliff’s foot. Max does, too, following. It’s in Furiosa’s footprints that he sees something. A gleam of metal and bone.</p><p>Max nudges with his foot, brushes more sand away. As Furiosa watches, Max lifts a metal skull. Doing that takes both hands. Someone’s crammed deadtech into the skull’s eyes – you can almost believe it would look at you through glassy rounds set in steel orbits.</p><p>Furiosa is facing Max, now. “That looks Citadel, all right. Are there more bones?” They search.</p><p>Yes, there are. Max uncovers metal bones and human bones. The human ones are fresh bones, fine bones. Enough to make up most of a woman. There’s an upper skull, delicate, dusty, of this place. As if she’d rested peacefully despite the words Max remembered her saying. Judgement Day. Terminated.   </p><p>Furiosa, with her flesh hand, sieves the human bones from the metal ones. She picks the skull up last. “It’s either her, or…” Furiosa leaves a name unsaid, cradles the skull to her with her own steel arm.</p><p>“Do you want this?” Max hoists the metal skull again.</p><p>Furiosa stares at it before answering. “No.”</p><p>“’S a lot of metal.”</p><p>“It’s over. All of it,” Furiosa says. She doesn’t explain.</p><p>Relieved, Max drops it. He knows it can’t be the skull of the man he left behind. No matter what the vision-haunted darkness in the back of his own skull whispers.</p><p>The wind picks up, scouring sand against them.</p><p>“Let’s go.”</p><p>Max follows her. As they pull away, Furiosa, steely and serene, does not look back. Max does. He can’t see the metal skull’s gleam at all. The Wasteland, the inevitable future, has already claimed it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The History Woman’s death, described here, is in a deleted scene from <i>Mad Max: Fury Road.</i></p><p>Gosh this took a while, thanks for being patient, prompter!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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